1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns hospital bedroom lighting.
2. Background Art
Hospitalized patients often struggle when they waken in unfamiliar rooms, and can hurt themselves by attempting to navigate in the dark. The industry has a variety of lighting systems to handle this challenge, none of which provide a satisfactory solution, as follows.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,234,642 discloses a solution in which a lighting system is added to a bed's undercarriage, that illuminates the area around the edge of the bed. The lighting function of this product is designed for use primarily in multi-bed hospital patient rooms, and therefore the light only illuminates the area under the edge of the bed, so as not to disturb other patients in the room.
The dim, narrowly focused light does not illuminate enough of the room to allow the patient to safely navigate their way to and from the restroom at night, which is how and why most patient falls within a hospital occur. Moreover, a hospital must buy the specific bed model that has the lights installed in order to gain the benefit of the light associated with the bed. There is no capability to use this product to retrofit existing beds.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,600,305 discloses a bed-exit sensing system that employs an infrared sensor been that sits low near the bed and parallel to the bedside to detect a patient leaving the bed.
This system has many problems. Modern hospital beds that have integral bed exit-sensing have made this system obsolete. Since a patient could potentially exit the bed from either side, it appears that two of the systems would be necessary, or at least the system would have to be changed from one side to the other.
This system also is duplicative of modern hospital beds, which tend to have an integral patient-detection signal that can be used for any purpose, and makes the signal system irrelevant. And finally, the IR beam will be interrupted as hospital staff move within the room and equipment is moved within the room, as electric cables and signal wires are repositioned. This movement will create false positive signals of patient movement. Movement of equipment will cause the system sensors to require frequent realignment.
The system does have a light that is mounted to the “Master Unit” that, according to the Abstract, sits on the patient floor, but with all of the false alarms that this system is bound to generate, the light would be on almost constantly and if bright enough to be effective, would keep the patient awake.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,471,198—This patent discloses a bed-mountable system that senses the presence or absence of a patient by using a reflected electromagnetic beam. It includes an output relay that “may alternatively operate an alarm bell or light to indicate the absence of the patient”. In this case, the implication is that the “light” is intended to be an indicator light to alert staff, similar to the way a nurse call corridor light indicates an active call. It does not, in and of itself, include any kind of lighting to illuminate the patient room.
The ability to detect the presence of a patient in a hospital bed has been perfected by bed manufacturers. This patent is still valid, but irrelevant to today's hospital beds, which routinely come with patient detection systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,067,005—This patent discloses a “patient exit” signal, in which pressure sensors are mounted to the bed side rails. The signals are intended to detect when the patient is attempting to exit the bed and “sound a buzzer, and/or a call bell, and/or illuminate the bed so that a nurse or attendant is amply alerted . . . ”
Once again, as in above patents and current products, the purpose is to illuminate only the bed itself to alert staff. It is not intended to illuminate the room. Other obvious problems are that the patient may accidently set the system off by grabbing the side rail when they are attempting to simply change their position in the bed; visitor and staff may set it off by leaning over the side rail to tend to the patient or lower it. Multiple false alarms tend to cause the staff to ignore all alarms.
These patents summarize the prior art, which focuses on ways of detecting the presence of patients in beds, a task easily handled by modern hospital beds. The hospital bed industry needs a system that will assist hospitalized patients by lighting rooms only when patients leave their beds, does not light the room unduly by activating without false positives and does not create a need for hospital staff to modify their everyday operations to maintain the system.